The 2012 election has
certainly not felt like a contest carried out in a nation at war. Though 68,000
U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and the 2,000th
American was recently killed in the decade-long conflict, President Barack
Obama has largely relegated his promises of winding down the war to an
afterthought in his stump speech. His rival, Mitt Romney, barely mentions the
war at all. The U.S military pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, but that
has gotten far less play in the campaign than the killing of Osama bin Laden.
And neither candidate discusses how or when the open-ended U.S. war on terror
might finally come to an end...

The absence of wartime from
the political scene enables the sort of election campaign we've had this year. Volunteer
members of the armed forces continue to fight overseas, but the election turns
on the economy. With the voters disengaged from American military policy, their
representatives in Congress lack the incentive to act as a check on the war
powers.

It turns out, then, that peacetime
in American politics doesn't lead to peacetime policies. It enables American
presidents of both parties to engage in a war without end.